Nick started his online comic Misinterpreted Complications just over a year ago primarily as a means of keeping himself off the streets and out of trouble.  His preferred artistic medium had been painting on canvas or found bits of wood, but he now enjoys the immediacy of the comic form — not to overlook, of course, the readiness of paper and pens for portability.

When he isn’t fabricating nostalgia for a time he never knew, he can either be found getting his hands filthy digging and dreaming in various allotments around Bristol or unnecessarily tinkering with — and otherwise making his way around the city on — a squiggly handle-barred bicycle,  all while procrastinating from, or alternatively pretending to do, his post-graduate studies.  It is perhaps not a surprise, therefore, that contemplating vaguely introspective comics fits well into Nick’s emerging milieu.

MisComp is updated on a roughly weekly basis. A self-published “best of the first year” is available now, in made-to-order paperback or hardcover. Email him (misinterpretedcomplications@gmail.com) for details.

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Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary
By Justin Green
McSweeney’s

“It’s nice to have accolades,” writes the author, in the afterword to this latest edition, “even if they are not quite true.” Justin Green is being modest, of course. The past 37 years have, perhaps, taught the artist how to accept a compliment—even if he doesn’t entirely buy into its validity. But even with just under four decades’ worth of lauds, there’s no doubt still something downright overwhelming in McSweeney’s lovingly compiled tribute to Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.

Let’s start, naturally, with the back cover, wherein, of the four names present, Chris Ware is unquestionable the least well known. The indie comics god gladly caps off his blurb with the words “Thank God for Binky Brown. And Thank God for Justin Green.” Robert Crumb similarly gushes, writing, in part, “Justin Green is the first and the best!” The exclamation mark is his. The other two quotes? They’re not verbose—or earnest—but, well, they’re from Kurt Vonnegut and Federico Fellini.

And then there’s the matter of the foreword, penned by Art Spiegelman, a long time Green fan who in many ways helped proved the impetus for this book. The Maus author, it seems, has some difficulty keeping his enthusiasm for the work to a single page.

For those of us who entered the fray long after Binky Brown first went out of print, such unbridled passion from the pens of heroes is perhaps a touch overwhelming—especially on the heels of years of critical fawning for the work that “started it all.”

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[Above, we're pretty sure Anders and Maria have fairly positive feelings toward one another. Below, a bouncing baby Dispatch.]

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In the world of autiobiographical comics, there’s surely a feeling that, from time to time, things can get a little “too real,” requiring a step back from the work—a chance to reassess how much one is willing to reveal for the sake of art.

While a reasonable person surely wouldn’t mistake the stories contained in Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days for autobiography, Al Columbia insists that there’s more than a little of his own life contained in its cartoony pages—enough for him to take pause when things get a little too real.

[Part One] [Part Two]

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As 2009 winds to an end, it’s time once again to reflect on the year that was, by culling together a list of the year’s top books. Rather than generating a site-wide “definitive” list, however, we opted once again to survey a wide cross-section of the industry’s movers and shakers, including artists, writers, publishers, podcasters, scholars, and even lowly comic journalists.

It’s a testament, I think, to the medium’s so-called “golden age” that nearly ever respondent complained that it was just too damned hard to whittle their list down to five choices. In some cases, people bit the bullet and stopped at five—in others, there are all sorts of “honorable mentions.” We kept everything in. We felt their pain.

Also interesting is that, with a few exceptions, there aren’t really any universal choices across lists. Asterios Polyp, not surprisingly, made plenty of lists. The Book of Genesis, Pim & Francie, A Drifting Life, AD, George Sprott, and Ken Dahl’s Monsters all fared pretty well, too. And, while there were certainly some reprints on a number of lists, the number seems to have taken a dip since last year–a promising sign for new content, I suppose.

Thanks everyone who contributed to the list. If you’re an artist who would like to contribute your top five, drop us a line at dailycrosshatch@gmail.com. We’ll be adding to the list for the rest of the year.

With that in mind, we proudly present The Best Damned Comics of 2009.

–BH

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[Above Scottie Allie's characters discover an old secret to fix a recession in "Exurbia" below the economically stimulated Dispatch.]

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Getting There/Getting Where
by Robyn Jordan
Naptime Press

Getting There/Getting Where is an autobiographical comic by Robyn Jordan.  The topics addressed are (generally) jury duty, acquaintances and riding the subway.

This mini is short and sweet.  Just a simple little 16-page collection of stories from a cartoonist who is able to tell pleasantly compact stories and lay out an attractive page of art.

Even if the admittedly mundane subject matter doesn’t interest you, I’m certain that Getting There/Getting Where will pique any reader’s interest in Jordan’s work.

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Vatican Hustle
By Greg Houston
NBM

Leafing through piles of comics, it’s become clear that, over the past couple of years, countless writers have begun to view sequential art as a gateway to other, more profitable mediums. Hollywood studios, after all, have long been trolling the Internet in search of the next major propriety—and really, who can blame them? The well of television remakes has largely dried up, while superhero books and graphic novels have proven a seemingly endless source of revenue.

Ultimately what we, the comics readers, are left with are a illustrated screenplays, extended storyboards, proofs of concepts bound and sold through the direct market. The vast majorities of these books don’t deserve a second look. Poor movie pitches make for even poorer graphic novels—particularly when penned by writers who have no devotion to the form beyond its recognized potential as a springboard to bigger and better things.

And then there are comics like Vatican Hustle. Greg Houston’s book isn’t so much a movie pitch, so much as a warped adolescent fantasy of what genre film might be in some forgotten era when Civil War re-enactors attacked leperous clown servants and no one though twice when you kicked the shit out the evil pop in the midst of one of his signature orgies.

Vatican Hustle is a love letter to the blacksploitation genre penned in the only manner such a note can successfully be executed: way the hell over the top. There are melting mobsters, flying holy men—even Charles Manson makes a brief, drug-induced appearance—and in the middle of it all a giant afroed, platform-shoed badass battling corruption in the epicenter of Catholicism.

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[Above, Jess Fink makes a movie. Below, the Dispatch b-roll.]

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I’ll confess to a certain degree of cynicism a few months back when Desert Island Comics owner Gabe Fowler first informed me of his vision for Brooklyn-based festival. Any initial doubts I’d had about the project were only compounded upon discovering that another was being planned for the borough, less than a month before his. The latter, of course, morphed into King Con, held at the Lyceum, in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood.

King Con was, by most accounts (save, of course, for chilly temperatures in the cavernous attic space that housed the weekend’s panels), considered a success. Elemetns of that assessment could no doubt be attributed to the breadth from which the show drew, with exhibitors ranging from Superman artist Neal Adams to a woman who fashioned tiny dinosaur skeletons from balsa wood.

One assumed that the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival would prove decidedly more focused, much like Fowler’s Metropolitan Avenue storefront, which has eschewed superhero books almost entirely, in favor of smaller presses and homemade titles. If the show’s title was any indication, however, the festival would not be content to merely draw on the city’s comics community, instead exploring the sometimes nebulous lines between indie comics and fine art, a fact seemingly confirmed when Picturebox founder Dan Nadel was brought onto to project. At the very least, the show would prove effective as a counterpoint to the talent on display at King Con.

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